With the increasing popularity of service oriented architectures, solutions are being developed with a service centric model. When a services-based solution needs to be deployed in a datacenter environment, the provisioning has to ensure that all the services that the solution uses have been provisioned and started. Failure to do so would cause the solution to fail at runtime.
Existing systems support components that are defined at the time the system is implemented. For these components, both the parameters and dependencies are well-known. However, as the solutions become more complex, it becomes impossible to statically define all prerequisite components and their requirements at the time the hosting environment is shipped.
As screens used to collect information about each prerequisite and its parameters are defined via the conventional user interface, it is necessary to be able to specify the requirements of each service/component when the component is introduced and subsequently to use this information in select screens presented to the user during submission of provisioning requests. As the user who submits the request may have a different role and expertise from the user that defines the services/components and thus may lack the necessary knowledge, the restrictions for each parameter must also be defined when the service is introduced.
Unfortunately, conventional provisioning systems and user interfaces do not adequately account for the addition of components at runtime.